Deposition
by Tiamat's Child
Summary: Scar meets a woman who's trying to write it all down. Spoilers for the Ishval flashback arc.


**Title:** Deposition  
**Author:** Tiamat's Child  
**Fandom:** Fullmetal Alchemist Manga  
**Word Count: **2965  
**Rating:** T  
**Characters/Pairing: **Scar, Marcoh, OCs  
**Summary:** Scar meets a woman who's trying to write it all down.  
**Warnings:** Discussions of genocide and violence.  
**Notes:** Written for fma_fic_contest at Livejournal, prompt 53, "Ishbal". Spoilers for the Ishval flashback arc. This takes place between Chapters 83 and 84.

**Deposition**

_My name is Nashak. My sister's name is Vahbiz, and she is all the family I have now. We were at school together, and soldiers came, and they said, "Come out," but the priest said,_

"Go out the back way and run, and do not stop running, no matter who calls out to you. Do not stop even if you hear my voice," he said. So we did. We ran and ran and ran, but he did not run with us. He went out the front door, and none of us saw him after that.

We ran, and someone shot my best friend, Behzad. I would have stopped to help her, but I had Vahbiz's hand, and Behzad shouted at me. Her hands were full of blood. I do not know what happened to her, because I kept running, until Vahbiz and I came to a bush of brambles, and we lay there flat on our bellies, all day and all night and all the next day. Soldiers walked right in front of us, and even stopped and stood. I don't know how they didn't see us, or hear us. I was sure they would.

They talked together but I was too frightened. I don't remember what they said.

When it was dark on the second day, we got up, and went looking for water, and once we had found it, we ran. We hid in gullies and bushes and stream beds when we could find them and in that way, we crossed the border.

* * *

"Thank you, Nashak," Mahdokht said, when she looked up from her notebook to find him holding up his hands and shrugging. "Give me a moment?"

"Of course," he said, and stood up to stretch while she dated the bottom of the page and drew a line across it.

"Would you sign it for me?" she asked, holding up the notebook. "Just to say that you're really the one who said this."

"No problem." He signed with a flourish and handed it back to her with a bow. "I guess you've heard everything I said before, right?"

She smiled and took the notebook. "Everybody's story is different, even though it's true a some things happen a lot. We should get back," she added, and stood up, loping down the hill side with long, steady strides, arms wide out for balance like a bird.

Nashak grinned and ran after her, leaping ahead of her with a loud whoop, shouting to her over his shoulder, "Race you!"

* * *

They skidded into the settlement at a run, Nashak attempting to stop, since he'd already lost some way back, when it turned out that Mahdokht could run down a hill as sure footed as a young goat, and was as fast on the flat plain as a gazelle. Mahdokht didn't seem to be trying to stop. She laughed as she leapt out of the way of a tall man and a short man. "Beg your pardon!" she said, and let her momentum carry her down to the well.

Nashak finally pulled himself short and stood in front of the two men, catching his breath while bent double, his hands on his calves.

"What a lively young woman," the short man said, chuckling. The tall man didn't say anything.

"That's Mahdokht," Nashak said, because Nashak always had breath for talking, if not always for other things. "She's a pilgrim. She goes around and she takes peoples stories for them, so that she can use them to get justice, some day. Hello."

The tall man was Ishvallan. The short man was wearing a rough cloak. When he pushed it back, Nashak's eyes widened. He wasn't Ishvallan, but that wasn't what made Nashak's breath stop. The man's face was a mass of strange scarring - not burn scars and not cuts. Nashak didn't know what they were. But the man's brown eyes were kind, and his smile was gentle.

"That's a big project," he said.

Mahdokht came back up behind them, notebook in hand as always. "I've got time," she said. "Hello, I'm Mahdokht."

"So the young man was telling us."

"I'm Nashak," Nashak said. "Sorry."

"You're taking depositions?" the tall man asked. He was scarred up too, but nothing like as bad as the shorter man.

Mahdokht looked up at him, and smiled. "Yes," she said.

The man nodded.

Nashak looked between the two of them. But Mahdokht just kept smiling, her head tilted like someone measuring a slope, and the man didn't seem to be inclined to say anything further, and a small crowd was gathering. It didn't feel like a crowd that was sizing brand new people up, but more like the kind of group where everyone involved has already met, and is just interested in how the people in the middle will act now that they are under new circumstances.

Nashak decided he didn't want to be part of the live exhibit on human behavior. "Good to meet you," he said, and ducked off to find Vahbiz.

* * *

The man who answered to Scar because he had to answer to something found Teacher Pulad sitting across from the girl collecting depositions. The teacher was still talking.

"In the fall of that year a woman came to my house," he said. "She was bleeding from a superficial bullet wound to her upper arm. She told me that she had been caught up in a sweep for curfew violations and taken to a hill outside the city. There she and some two dozen other prisoners were made to line up along a ditch."

Scar's eyes widened. He knew what this was. He was intruding. He didn't want to stay, but his feet wouldn't move. His hands wouldn't.

He stood still on the edge of the shack.

"This was very early. The soldiers fired at the prisoners. They were using rifles. The woman was wounded and fell into the trench. Everyone else fell too. Some of them fell on top of her. They were dead."

Scar found his will and walked away. Pulad had not chosen to give that story to him.

A little later, the girl, Mahdokht, came out, and smiled at him. "He's ready for you now," she said. "Thank you for waiting."

He nodded.

"Sir," she said, "would you give a deposition to me?"

He stared at her. She was tall for a woman, straight backed and steady, though the way the shape of her bones shadowed her face said she was too thin.

He didn't think he could tell her. How would he say it?

"I'll think about it."

* * *

_My name is Farida. I am fourteen now. I was eight that day. I remember it this way: Mother was in the bakery. She had just finished kneading one batch of dough, and she gave it to me so I could set it aside to rise while she started on the next batch. I liked very much to help her. I was such an obedient child, I remember that._

My aunt ran in and she grabbed my mother by the arm and said, "Gulnar, Gulnar, they are burning the street, they are burning the people." And my mother turned from her, and she took me, she took me behind our house, to our little courtyard, where we had one of the old cisterns, which was very deep, but it had been so dry that the water came up only to my shoulders. I know this because my mother put me in it, and she made my aunt get in too, and then she got in, and lifted the cover over us. It was a heavy clay cover. I could dance and run on it. I do not know how she moved it, but she did. Perhaps God gave her strength.

"Now pray for your father, Farida," my mother told me, and I did, all through the day and night we spent in our cistern, but when we came up again, we never did find my father, nor my brother either.

* * *

Farida took a deep breath and looked down at her hands. "I don't think I can talk anymore," she said. "Not now."

"Thank you," Mahdokht said, and reached out to gently put a hand on Farida's. "It's good to take care of yourself."

Farida made a small snuffling noise and said, "It is. Have you ever written your own story down, Mahdokht?"

Mahdokht shook her head. "No, not really."

"Maybe you should think about it."

"I should," Mahdokht said. She tilted her head, and smiled suddenly, as if a veil had been taken from her, and there was something new now that she could see. "Thank you, Farida. Has anyone told you lately that you are very wise?"

"No, I don't think so," said Farida. She smiled. "Thanks, though."

"Ah, there you are!" Marcoh beamed at Scar when he came back down the hill with a load of firewood. "I thought you might be out talking to people. Here you go!"

And he held out a battered paper envelope, the kind with a twist tie, for documents. Scar took it. "Where's Yoki?"

"I'm not quite sure anymore. Somewhere. I think the children who took him mentioned digging clay?"

Scar shook his head. Yoki'd have them all organized into shift crews and shirk the actual work if the kids weren't careful. Outsmarting the man would be good practice for them.

Probably.

Possibly he should go check.

"That envelope's from Miss Mahdokht," Marcoh said. "She asked me to give it to you. Looked very earnest about it."

Scar nodded. "Thanks."

"Well, I was at home. And it turns out she had a bottle of alcohol and sterile bandages in her supplies, so it was good I talked to her. I think I'll be able to deal with that worrying mole Roshan has, with those."

Scar didn't answer. It was a good thing, of course.

* * *

_My name is Mahdokht, because my mother was Mahtab, and my father named me. This is the sort of thing he could never resist. He loved lineages. There was in our home a beautiful book containing charts of our family's history back to the earliest days of our valley - in my childhood, before the war intruded on us, we did not live in the city but outside it, on the slopes of a valley that was green at the bottom, with a stream winding through. We herded goats there, fine fluffy animals that provided the wool for my mother's spinning and weaving._

My mother Mahtab was a renowned artist. She could make cloth breathe. Her tapestries would have earned enough to support us, but my father's family was a family of farmers as well as herders, and he could not rest unless he was growing the food we lived on. There were desert hens, the little kind, that you do not see here in Amestris, that slept at night in the trees, never on the ground. And there were herbs and vegetables and flowers and the orchard that had been our family's for centuries upon centuries.

I was a happy child and I knew everything and nothing. Like the other children, I learned prayers and the basics of theology from our local priest, but it was otherwise primarily my father who taught me. He had been a teacher in the city, once. He had taught reading and writing, but he was also good with mathematics, and he taught me now, though he had given up his classroom for the sake of the family farm. This was, I admit it, mainly because the priest was elderly, and I gave him more trouble than my father felt such a respected old man should have to deal with.

This was my life until I was twelve years old.

That winter that I was twelve, the order came demanding our removal to the city. My mother and my father refused to go. This was our home, they said, and it was illegal for the government to take it away from us. How could they do that? The land was ours, by all the laws we knew of, both Amestrian and Ishvallan.

They resolved to fight the order. They would take it to court, and they would not leave. Surely reason and justice would prevail and if it did not, then at least they would have done their very best. I would stay with them.

The day the soldiers came, I had been sent up into the hills with the goats. I don't know if my parents expected some trouble, or if I had simply been particularly annoying. It was one of my father's favorite tactics to get me out from under foot, no matter the occasion. He would tell me to take the goats and come back with a poem. The goats would keep me safe, the poem would keep me thinking.

They might have known. They might not have. When I came home, I could not find them. The house was empty. I wasn't so worried at first. I waited for a while, and then I decided to make supper for all of us.

I fed the animals. I waited. Eventually I was so hungry that I ate without them. I waited. I waited, and waited, and fell asleep waiting. In the morning I went out to look, trying very hard to keep a rein on my fear, and I think it was this that saved me again, because I went by a high road the goats knew, and when I saw the temple burning, and the soldiers standing guard, they were not looking up at me.

The soldiers had guns. They fired them into the temple. I remember this. I remember the noise of it, though I had never heard a rifle like theirs before. My father had one, an ancient old thing that wasn't accurate at all, but the sound frightened lions hunting alone, which were the most dangerous kind. I don't remember if I heard anyone screaming. I don't remember. I don't know how I knew or what I knew, but I ran home like lightning was after me, took what little I could carry, and fled with the goats.

It was good I took the goats. I think I would have died of thirst without them. I didn't know where I was going. I don't know if I was thinking of going anywhere, except that I went into the desert hills, as my father would have told me to go. I left, and I do not know how long I stayed up there, except that when I came down again, there was no one anymore, not at the fort where there had always been soldiers, not in the town at the end of the valley, not on the farms, not anywhere. There was no one anymore, and the roof of the temple had fallen in.

I never looked there. I was too afraid to. But if anyone ever wants to find bodies, they should look in that place, under the fallen roof of the old temple in Crooked Back Creek Valley, as they call it on the maps now. No one lives there anymore. But there was a town there once, and that is where my family is buried. My grandmother and my grandfather are in the burial ground in the hills, and so are my great grand fathers and my great grand mothers and so on and so on -

And my mother and my father, I believe, are there on the floor of the temple, with God.

* * *

Mahdokht looked up from her notes when a shadow spread over the top of them. "Sir!" she said, beaming up at Scar. "I wasn't expecting you so soon."

He crouched down across from her, and then seemed to think better of it, folding himself into a sitting position. "This is yours," he said, and held out the envelope.

"Did you read it?" she asked, as she took it from him.

"Yes."

"Thank you for bringing it back to me. I need a type writer. Long hand starts to hurt after a while."

He nodded. She waited. After a long moment, he said, "I stopped talking much after my brother died."

She nodded. "I didn't talk for a long time either. I think I only started again because you have to talk if people are going to talk to you."

Scar nodded. After a long, quiet moment where Mahdokht listened to the pulse of the wind in the trees and the shift of grasses against grasses, he said, "I'm out of practice."

"It will come back," she said. "Or not. Either way is fine."

"Yes," he said, and looked searchingly at her, as if he could look into her if he looked hard enough. "You have time?"

She nodded, and leaned forward to sweep her notes back together. "I have plenty of time."

He waited while she flipped open a notebook, bit lightly at the end of her pen, and looked up at him, trying to show how she would listen, how quiet an ear she could be, how sympathetic.

"I cannot give you my name," he said, "I have renounced my claim to it. But I am still a priest. Having once been given and accepted, that cannot be set aside or torn away. My brother was not a priest. He loved learning, and he loved harmony..."


End file.
